[Chris Sanderson]

I get that 23.98 is not a drop-frame format. Im also not comparing Final Cut to Avid. Im just surprised its such a guessing game and this wouldn’t be more worked out by now. Im using an IO HD to do the 23.98 to 59.94 conversion and it seems that the slippage you mentioned is not consistent for me. Once I get it, I can layoff all day long but it seems if I come back the next day, ill have to slip it around another frame or so. Im still trouble shooting this on my end to figure out if its a hardware thing or what. It’s also hard to spend time trouble shooting because we rent decks when we are laying off and generally don’t have a great deal of time to test with them.

It just seems there should be an absolute way of knowing what the TC your timeline will end up as when outputting to various formats/framerates

[Chris Sanderson]

Wow, thanks Shane. So it really is that janky?! Pretty incredible the hoops you have to jump through to make that work. Im looking at the framerate calc but Im somewhat unclear how to use it. I expected to be able to set-up my timeline and get a frame accurate layoff to tape. We’re not doing long programs, just :30 spots so it seems my slip method is fine.

Id really think FCP would have a more sophisticated way of handling this as its so common to shoot 23.98 these days. Perhaps by tracking both timecodes. It would be nice if I could setup a custom TC track with a target TC and let FC do the calculations on the fly. That way you could park your playhead anywhere and now exactly what the TC on tape would be at that point. This is really disappointing but thanks for your help.

[Chris Sanderson]

Thanks for the advice guys. Michael, that doesn’t seem quite right though. I just did a test as Mark suggested using Final Cuts tone generator. The ‘mix down’ level in the audio tab of the sequence settings has no effect on the levels output through SDI. If you turn on ‘mix down’ in the Audio Mixer tool then yes it does have an effect but then you are also only getting a stereo output.

Also, channels 3 and 4 (center and low frequency) seem like they really should be mono as they are definitely not stereo. All the research ive done points to the conclusion that final cuts default 5.1 sequence preset will work fine as long as you set Left and Right as a stereo pair and your Ls,Rs also as a stereo pair in the timeline. Otherwise keeping everything at dual mono will also work as Mark pointed out.

Really appreciate the input guys.

[Chris Sanderson]

Hey Mark thats very helpful indeed! What I read in the manual was the mix level in the audio output is for your down mix only so it shouldn’t bare any relevance to what Im sending out of the SDI correct? The default 5.1 setup in Final Cut is:

Ch 1&2 Stereo 0db downmix
Ch 3 Mono -3db downmix
Ch 4 Mono ‘off’ downmix
Ch 5&6 Stereo -3db downmix

I kept it at the defaults and made sure Ch 1&2 and Ch 5&6 were set as stereo pairs in the timeline. Being that the downmix is only for monitoring purposes, this setup would work fine for laying off 5.1 to D5 correct? Each channel is mapped appropriately and in the order you specified.

[Chris Sanderson]

So i’ve been researching a bit more online and I’ve found this helpful article:

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/5-1_surround_sound_FCS2.html

Seems straight forward enough but Im still confused as to when/why I should set some channels to -3? He shows two examples of how you can set up your outputs but Im not quite clear why hes set them up as such.

In the examples he shows, channels 5&6 (Left surround and right Surround) are always set to -3 whether you use stereo or dual mono. But channels 1&2 are set 0 when in stereo and -3 when in dual mono. To make matters worse, he says channels 1&2 are L Surround and R Surround which is incorrect yes?

Very confused.

Thanks,
Emery

[Chris Sanderson]

Thanks guys. Shouldn’t the track already be panned hard left and hard right when I get it from the mixers or is this something I need to set up in Final Cut?

Chris